The Perfect Cartoon

Last time, I made the case that the pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of perfection are mutually exclusive. I could use psychological literature to support this point, but, instead, I ask you to imagine a person you know who is a perfectionist. Are they smiling?

Neither am I, because I’ve been searching for the perfect New Yorker cartoon. There are tens of thousands to choose from—more than enough to find myself in the muddle known as the paradox of choice. Perhaps that’s what’s happened to the woman in this cartoon by Chon Day.

Or perhaps she’s just a perfectionist. She certainly isn’t smiling.

But I am now, because I’ve found the perfect cartoon. First of all, consider the degree of difficulty. Single-panel cartoons without any words are the hardest to come up with. Fewer than five percent of the submissions I see as cartoon editor are captionless, and most of those are more whimsical than outright funny.

Then there’s longevity. This cartoon from 1946 still gets laughs by letting us indulge our aggressive, even violent impulses without any guilt.

To do this, Day has created his characters with great economy to engage both our empathy and antipathy. The woman is a cold, imperious, impossible-to-please dowager for whom we have no compassion. The salesman’s back is turned to us, his features obscured and intentionally nondescript so that we can project ourselves on to his suffering.

Next, let’s look at the graphic machinery.

Our gaze drops down from the face of the dowager, then to the right, first onto the form of a black shoe, then a second, and then a gun. The two black shoes delay, ever so slightly, our perception of the gun as a gun, thereby heightening the surprise. On the level of human dynamics and the psychology of perception, this is a perfect cartoon.

Perfect for me, that is. Go to the new, improved Cartoon Bank and pick your own perfect cartoon and tell us why. Leave a comment below, or use the hashtag #perfectcartoon on Twitter.